Timemelters review

Spend the evening playing with yourselves.

From being able to slow the world around you in Max Payne, controling the pace of combat in SUPERHOT, to slowing, stopping, or even reversing the clock in Timeshift, manipulating time in a game can make you feel like a badass. In Autoexec Games’ Timemelters, you play as Teagan, a young woman who’s accused of being a witch. Pleasingly, her powers outshine the archetypal spellcasting.

Just as she’s about to be burned at the stake, a group of monsters attack and maul the accusatory villagers. When Teagan awakens, she finds the consciousness of a convicted women who was beside her is now in her head. The upside is that this condemned sorceress instructs you about your newfound temporal abilities.

Me, Me, and Me Takes Down the Mob

Timemelters’ campaign pits you against sequences of mobs of enemies who make a beeline for your position. To neutralize these attacks, you can place a variety of traps. Some might only alter the footpath of adversaries. But other capabilities turn trees into towering allies who can extend their elongated limps to ensnare a few foes. On a basic level, Timemelters works as a tower defense title as you place traps and shoot lightning bolts to wear down the numbers of a relentlessly advancing crowd. However, the difference here is that a single hit can kill Teagan.

But death won’t immediately end your game. Instead, time is rewound, and Teagan’s actions become an Echo. Effectively, that means you’ll witness a translucent Teagan clone reiterating your behaviors, while a new Teagen enters the fray. And this cycle continues until you’re able to eliminate every enemy or you run out of Echoes. In execution, battlefields can look as busy as your typical multiplayer action game, but every participant is duplicating your movements. Given that Teagan can generate her own teleportation points, Timemelters provides plenty of tools for players to use.

Putting the “I” in Team

In execution those solutions factor into the game’s conundrums. Stages routinely involve figuring out how to use the right combination of abilities. One early boss is only vulnerable from behind. As such, you’ll need one Teagan Echo to get the enemy’s attention, which another Teagen sweeps around to attack their unprotected side. Of course, that’s one of Timemelters’ easiest confrontations. Naturally, these grow progressively more difficult.

Later, you’ll have to utilize every skill in your arsenal with pinpoint precision. As such, an appreciation for trial-and-error style gameplay is essential for enjoyment. And yes, there are a few frustrating difficulty spikes across the campaign and the inclusion of 40 supplemental challenge stages. If you do find yourself stuck, the hints concealed in the game’s menu can be surprisingly useful. That said, the advice won’t be helpful when you sporadically wrestle with invisible environmental boundaries.

Big Ideas on a Modest Budget

But largely, the same kind of ingenuity that went into Timemelters’ level design is also evident in other components. If you want to know more about Teagan and her world, the game offers some solid storytelling. Sure, you can tell from the dead-eyed character models that Melters doesn’t have a substantial developmental budget. But what’s here is engaging, doling out just enough exposition to keep you interested.

But if you’re just here for the strategic action, the game accommodates with a mode than trims the storytelling down. This kind of accommodation is also found in the game’s co-operative mode, which revises some of the game’s events so an online partner can take control of Teagan’s brother. And here’s the interesting thing: Timemelters plays quite differently with another person, requiring partners to think and play as a true team. It’s evident that Autoexec Games put some effort into this component, offering a friend pass to motivate players to give it a try.

Conclusion

Genre amalgams don’t always live up to a developer’s aspirations. All too often, the mixture resembles an over-seasoned recipe where the first bite is interesting, but finishing the meal becomes a chore. Fundamentally, Timemelters sidesteps that issue, finding new ways to turn its fusion of action, strategy, and light puzzling into an experience you’ll likely savor. In a perfect world, we’d have more innovative indies like this and fewer unimaginative blockbusters.

Timemelters was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher